https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=n1hzRrk22yc
Alright, so Jason the Gatherer asked a long question, but I think it’s an important one because I kind of saw this recently. Hi Jonathan, I was listening to a recent video from Paul Van der Klaay. He mentioned an answer you gave to a question posed by John Ravichy at the Thunder Bay Conference which was unrecorded. The question was something like, can angels, egregores exist without man? Your answer was something like, all of the world exists through the son of man. Can you elaborate on this? It obviously parallels the line from Colossians, all things have been created for him and for him. It seems like your answer was yes and no, which seems to be your answer to many questions. I’m still trying to draw the distinction between this and ideas that I used to encounter in Hinduism about the world itself being God’s dream. I’ve heard before that when it’s said the world is an illusion, the world illusion more closely means image rather than misinterpreted perception. Do you think that this definition of illusion parallels your answer to the initial question that the world is an image representation of God? Thanks. So that question is important because I saw John Ravichy in another interview, someone posted a clip of him kind of defending me, which is very kind of him, to a kind of aggressive, secular atheist type and trying to defend my position. And he talked about the notion of demon, let’s say, and angels. And the guy, they talked about that, like, do the angels and demons pre-exist humans? Something like that. Can angels and demons exist without humans? And so I think that this question is a bad question. It’s not the right question. It’s a question which I think is in some ways misunderstood in terms of what it is that we mean by precede some other things. What is it that we mean by preceding, let’s say, or existing before or existing separate from something like that? So the best way to understand the question is to ask yourself the question at the level that you can perceive, which is at the human level. And the question is, do you exist without your body? Do humans exist without the elements that constitute the way they interact with the world? Do humans exist without bodies? Do humans pre-exist bodies? And so I think that that’s the problem. I think that the problem of angels is a similar problem. The question, do angels exist without humans is an irrelevant question. It’s a question that doesn’t make, that makes as much sense as the idea of asking if you exist before your body or if you exist without your body. And so what’s interesting is that there are some theories, neoplatonic theories, that would have said you do exist before your body, but not in the Christian idea. In the Christian sense, you see, even in St. Gregory of Nyssa, he talks about how the person begins to exist, you know, in their body. And so to a certain extent, you could say that the person exists eternally in the mind of God. That is, I think that that’s acceptable to say that. But to the extent that they exist, that they exist in any way that can have substance, then they exist in their body. And that’s why Christians move toward the resurrection and that there’s a mystery about the moment between the moment you die and the resurrection. Like, I think that I tried to settle this problem with the notion of the idea of a fractal ending where the end of one thing is the end of all things. Like the end of one thing coincides with the end of all things, something like that. The end of a microcosm coincides with the end of the macrocosm. But I think that that’s the problem with the question of angels. It’s like to ask whether they could exist without humans, the answer is no. But you could say that in some ways, they pre-exist us humans, you know, because they act on us. They act on us in ways that are beyond the individual. And so the patterns, these active patterns, you know, virtues or passions in terms of the demons or whatever, they act on us and we act in them. We could say we become the body of these principalities. And so the question of asking whether they exist outside us is, I think, is an irrelevant question. But there’s also many ways that it’s imaged in the tradition and one of the ways really is the notion of Christ or the notion of the incarnate man as in many ways preceding creation. And so being there at the outset of creation and the Christian mystery of understanding that the divine logos that created the world is Jesus Christ is, was, let’s say, it’s difficult because it breaks normal causality. And so it’s hard to hold in our mind, especially if we try to hold it in time. But that mystery is pointed out in many places in the Church Fathers. And so I think that it’s apophatic and there’s something about it which is an aporia. It’s a kind of a something which doesn’t, isn’t completely logical. But we can also see how we need something like that in order to understand how the angels function. And then why do the angels act on us? Like why are we the bodies of these? Why is creation a subject to these principalities? So that’s the best that I can say. So Annie Crawford says, pre-existent patterns, isn’t that why angels exist before us then? Yes, you got it. That’s right. That’s exactly the way to understand it. So you could say angels pre-exist us, but they don’t because they are bound in man, and they also… So you could say something like, a good example would be, let’s say, like even when I said before in terms of your body, it’s like you don’t exist without your body. But you could say that you pre-exist elements of your body. That’s for sure because your body is changing. It’s the world of change. The world of the body is a world of change. And therefore, the elements that constitute your body are shifting and dying and being born. And so you precede that. You’re higher than that. That’s why you hold these things together. And so I think that in our experience, that is what the angels are, are these pre-existent intelligences and patterns that rule over reality. But there’s a man in which what we discover is that ultimately these patterns are also a reflection of man’s aspirations, you could say. And so they also exist to serve man. And that is why the most used ancient vision of the fall of the angels was that the angels refused to bow down before Adam in the garden. And that’s what brought about their fall. And I think that that’s the proper way to kind of understand it. And obviously it’s hard because if we have to be careful, like if we mix something like technical more philosophical type of descriptions with narrative mythological descriptions, we have to make sure we can move from one to the other without confusing one and the other and not being attentive that many of the way in which we describe angels are obviously analogies that we can’t describe angels directly. And when we talk about the man in which they exist in time, this is complicated because their bodies are not, they don’t have to have subtle bodies. They don’t have the same kinds of bodies that we do.